Jensen Huang resigns as Nvidia's CEO, and the stock claws back most of a double-digit plunge to close down 4.3%
Nvidia named CFO Colette Kress interim chief executive and created its first board chair. Rivals AMD and Broadcom gained more than 5%, retail buyers piled in, and the S&P 500 slipped just 0.35%.
Photo: Nana Dua / Pexels
The most important executive of the AI boom is gone. Nvidia announced before Thursday's open that co-founder Jensen Huang had resigned as president, chief executive and a member of the board, effective immediately, ending a 33-year run. The stock spent the morning in free fall, then recovered most of the damage by the close.
How the session ended
Nvidia closed down 4.34% at $166.19, according to Yahoo Finance data, and was the biggest decliner in the Dow. Early in the day the drop was far deeper. NBC News said the shares fell as much as 16%, while Reuters, as carried by The Business Times, put the low at nearly 12% down. NBC reported that Nvidia's market value briefly slipped below $4 trillion for the first time since 2025 before ending the day barely above that level, and that the week's slide has erased about $500 billion of value.
The broader market absorbed the hit. The S&P 500 fell 26.98 points, or 0.35%, to 7,592.40. The Nasdaq Composite lost 100.1 points, or 0.39%, to 25,366.09, and the Dow Jones Industrial Average dropped 189.4 points, or 0.36%, to 52,297.09, according to Reuters figures that matched Yahoo Finance data. Energy was the best of the 11 S&P 500 sectors, up 1.5% for a fourth straight gain, after oil jumped on comments from President Donald Trump about Iran.
Why Huang left
Nvidia's announcement did not give a reason. The departure followed a week of reports about Huang's personal conduct. The Associated Press summarized it this way: The New York Times reported that Huang had an affair with a businesswoman whom U.S. intelligence suspects of being a Chinese spy, which Beijing denies, and the outlet and others later reported that Nvidia employees said he had another affair with an executive who reported directly to him. A regulatory filing shows the board accepted his resignation on Wednesday, Nov. 11.
The national security angle is what worries some analysts most. "All told, given the national security concerns, we think the risk of more restrictive guidelines on shipments directly or indirectly into China has risen," JPMorgan analysts wrote on Thursday before the resignation was announced, NBC News reported. Huang has been a confidant of Trump, who is due to travel to China next week, according to Scotiabank.
Who runs Nvidia now
Colette Kress, Nvidia's chief financial officer since September 2013, is interim CEO and will keep the CFO job until a permanent successor is named. Before Nvidia she spent nearly 25 years in finance roles at Cisco and Microsoft, the company said. The board will consider internal and external candidates. Reuters said Kress and longtime engineer Ian Buck, who helped build Nvidia's CUDA software platform, had emerged as the leading internal names among investors and analysts.
Harvey C. Jones, a former CEO of chip-design software maker Synopsys who has sat on Nvidia's board since 1993, becomes its first-ever chair.
"The Board has full confidence in Colette and the leadership team, and we expect the company's operations, customer commitments and product roadmap to continue without interruption." - Harvey Jones, Nvidia board chair
Kress said in the same release that she was "committed to building on the extraordinary foundation Jensen created over the last 33 years." In an email to staff obtained by CNBC, she said Nvidia will hold a company meeting on Nov. 18. Reuters reported that Huang, Nvidia's fourth-largest shareholder with a 3.61% stake, also leaves the board.
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Buyers stepped in, and rivals rallied
Individual investors treated the drop as an opening. Retail traders bought about $111 million of Nvidia stock in the first half hour of trading, the biggest opening bid on record for the shares, according to Vanda Research data cited by Reuters.
Competitors moved the other way. Advanced Micro Devices rose 5.86% to $585.30 and Broadcom gained 5.54% to $364.36, according to Yahoo Finance data, and both were among the largest contributors to the S&P 500 along with Alphabet. One view in the market is that big AI customers may lean harder on alternative suppliers while Nvidia's leadership is unsettled. The Philadelphia Semiconductor index slipped only 0.5%, Reuters said, after surging 17.2% over the prior four sessions.
The AI cloud names took the real damage
The heaviest losses landed on the companies that rent out AI computing power, many of which Nvidia has backed. Nebius Group fell 16.8%, its biggest one-day drop since July 1, after its quarterly report. Barchart said Nebius forecast 2027 capital spending of $40 billion to $45 billion, far above the roughly $28.76 billion analysts expected. CoreWeave lost 6.9%, giving back part of Wednesday's surge, and data-center operators IREN and Applied Digital fell 6.5% and 5.4%, respectively.
"He's the face of Nvidia and Nvidia has been front and center of the AI build-out," Jun Bei Liu, lead portfolio manager at Ten Cap, told Reuters.
What carries into Friday
The open questions are about leadership and Washington, not about the order book. Investors will watch for any word on the CEO search, the Nov. 18 company meeting, and any sign that the spying allegations change U.S. policy on chip sales to China ahead of Trump's trip. The rate backdrop is getting tougher at the same time: the 10-year Treasury yield closed at 5.10% on Thursday, Treasury data show, as several Fed officials signaled support for more rate increases.
